I write a lot. Sometimes it gets weird.

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Tag: Taylor

From the best I can tell, the only reason a girl turns thirty-five is so the cat she’s had since college can pass away. It’s happened to too many friends of mine this year, and now I guess it’s my turn. Continue reading →

Have been told we have security and alternate routes. Fingers crossed! Adventure!

Taylor update: he’s eating, but he gets waves of hunger and then either gets distracted (which then he’ll eat again the second you put food under his face and go, “You were eating.” And then he’s all, “Oh, yes! Thank you.”) or he will follow me around like, “That was okay, but do you have anything fishier?”

He refuses the vet-suggested cat food like it’s a pile of flames. He will eat turkey baby food, some weird cheap meow mix goo, pounce, canned tuna juice and salmon. Right now there are so many little plates of stinky food piles on the floor of my kitchen, it looks like I run a tapas joint for cats. Life right now is a little disgusting. The good news is once I get to Guatemala, I might finally be far enough away from this apartment that I cannot smell it.

My housekeeper Lydia (not just my housekeeper, but this morning mine) uses my parking space when she comes over, which means I have to be out of the apartment by a certain hour. This was the kind of morning where I thought I had everything ready to go until the very last second, when I saw I still had trash to take down, needed to grab some notes I’d be working on today, and then I forgot my phone. Continue reading →

Any morning where you wake up to find your cat in hypoglycemic shock is a bad morning.

I immediately knew something was wrong when I woke up late. Taylor doesn’t let the sunrise pass without yelping for his food. He was under the writing desk, quite stiff and getting colder by the second. Continue reading →

Are we currently starring in some kind of romantic comedy together? Or are you planning on auditioning for a Will Ferrell movie or something? Because our time together lately, if montaged with a kicky Katrina and the Waves song in the background, looks like something Touchtone Pictures would proudly present.

Maybe you’re mad about the other night, when I moved in my sleep and it scared you so much you fell off the bed. Obviously I didn’t mean to wake up with such a start, but I probably shouldn’t have pointed at you and laughed. I don’t even know if my finger was anywhere near you, since it was so dark I couldn’t see anything. But if you could have heard what I heard — me gasping out of a nightmare, you gasping in a kitty sound, and then thunk-BUNK! — you would be pointing and laughing, too. Continue reading →

It’s been three attempts now of trying to get Cal to take two pills and switch to wet (diet) food in order to treat his asthma. That’s six pills and half a can.

That means I’ve accidentally eaten about half an antibiotic, more than a few fingertips worth of cat food, and almost gave Taylor his insulin twice when I couldn’t remember if I’d already (just) given him a shot. Cal is so depressed after we wrestle to get the pills into him (the antibiotic is big and I use a piller; the asthma pill is small and I have to get him to open his mouth in anger so I can toss it in) that he won’t eat his food. The pills are supposed to be increasing his appetite, so I don’t know what’s going on, other than he might have overheard the vet tell me that Cal now weighs twenty pounds, and “all that extra weight” around his chest isn’t helping his wheezing.

But he hasn’t wheezed in two days. He’s also barely eaten. His mood is exactly the same; no personality change. But if he doesn’t start eating soon, I’m going to be very worried. Tomorrow morning I’ll try the pills after I’ve fed him, which probably means I’ll be adding “washing cat-puke covered clothes” to my to-do list.

So, yes. If you’re still figuring out my Sexy Quotient, that’s one cat with asthma and a weight problem, plus one cat with diabetes and arthritis, multiplied by four different medications administered twice a day, divided by one sharps container for used syringes, to the power of dork plus infinity. Squared.

Whenever I open a new bag of cat food and pour it into the cat food container, Taylor acts like he just won a jackpot, pulling himself up to the stream of kibble, trying to catch one in his mouth mid-stream. I can’t imagine how much more delightful and tasty one-second old kibble is compared to the stuff he eats every day, but his excitement leads me to think that there’s a very big difference.

And then, this morning, I opened a new bag of coffee beans, and as I poured them into the coffee beans container, I started salivating. And if it were possible, I would have swiped a couple of those beans with my paw and jammed them right into my mouth, whole.

That’s what the vet told me when I brought Taylor in. It’s his other leg that’s injured. And as Taylor hissed and growled in my arms and the vet gave me this look, I felt like the worst pet owner in the world. How did I not notice that the limp had gotten better and then shifted to the other leg?

I asked if it’d be best to put the cast on him this time, so he didn’t keep injuring himself. The doctor said that the rest he was doing on his own was probably for the best, and since Taylor gets himself so worked up when he’s unhappy in the slightest (fur was flying around the room as he said this), he’d rather prescribe some pain medication and take a look again in two weeks. Continue reading →